Letters of Catherine Benincasa | Page 5

of the Altar, is the theme of her constant meditations. One
little phrase, charged with a lyric poignancy, sings itself again and
again, enlightening her more sober prose: "For nails would not have
held God-and-Man fast to the Cross, had love not held Him there." Her

conceptions are positive, not negative, and joyous adoration is the
substance of her faith.
But the letters show us that this faith was not won nor kept without
sharp struggle. We have in them no presentation of a calm spirit,
established on tranquil heights of unchanging vision, above our "mortal
moral strife." Catherine is, as we can see, a woman of many
moods--very sensitive, very loving. She shows a touching dependence
on those she loves, and an inveterate habit of idealising them, which
leads to frequent disillusion. She is extremely eager and intense about
little things as well as great; hers is a truly feminine seriousness over
the detail of living. She is keenly and humanly interested in life on this
earth, differing in this respect from some canonized persons who seem
always to be enduring it faute de mieux. And, as happens to all
sensitive people who refuse to seclude themselves in dreams, life went
hard with her. Hers was a frail and suffering body, and a tossed and
troubled spirit; wounded in the house of her friends, beset by problem,
shaken with doubt and fear by the spectacle presented to her by the
world and the Church of Christ. The letters tell us how these, her
sorrows and temptations, were not separated from the life of faith, but a
true portion of it: how she carried them into the Divine Presence, and
what high reassurance awaited her there. Ordinary mortals are inclined
to think that supernatural experience removes the saints to a perplexing
distance. In Catherine's case, however, we become aware as we study
the record that it brings her nearer us. For these experiences, far from
being independent of her outer life, are in closest relation with it; even
the highest and most mysterious, even those in which the symbolism
seems most remote from the modern mind, can be translated by the
psychologist without difficulty into modern terms. They spring from
the problems of her active life; they bring her renewed strength and
wisdom for her practical duties. An age, which like our own places
peculiar emphasis and value on the type of sanctity which promptly
expresses itself through the deed, should feel for Catherine Benincasa
an especial honour. She is one of the purest of Contemplatives; she
knows, what we to-day too often forget, that the task is impossible
without the vision. But it follows directly upon the vision, and this
great mediaeval mystic is one of the most efficient characters of her
age.

IV
Catherine's soaring imagination lifted her above the circle of purely
personal interests, and made her a force of which history is cognisant in
the public affairs of her day. She is one of a very small number of
women who have exerted the influence of a statesman by virtue, not of
feminine attractions, but of conviction and intellectual power. It is
impossible to understand her letters without some recognition of the
public drama of the time.
Two great ideals of unity--one Roman, one Christian in origin--had
possessed the middle ages. In the strength of them the wandering
barbaric hordes had been reduced to order, and Western Europe had
been trained into some perception of human fellowship. Of these two
unifying forces, the imperialistic ideal was moribund in Catherine's
time: not even a Dante, born fifty years after his true date, could have
held to it. Remained the ideal of the Church universal, and to this last
hope of a peaceful commonwealth that should include all humanity, the
idealists clung in desperation.
But alas for the faith of idealists when fact gives theory the lie! What at
this time was the unity of mankind in the Church but a formal
hypothesis? The keystone of her all-embracing arch was the Papacy.
But the Pope no longer sat heir of the Caesars in the seat of the
Apostles; for seventy years he had been a practical dependant of the
French king, living in pleasant Provence. Neither the scorn of Dante,
nor the eloquence of Petrarch, nor the warnings of holy men, had
prevailed on the popes to return to Italy, and make an end of the crying
scandal which was the evident contradiction of the Christian dream.
Meantime, the city of the Caesars lay waste and wild; the clergy was
corrupt almost past belief; the dreaded Turk was gathering his forces, a
menace to Christendom itself. The times were indeed evil, and the
"servants of God," of whom then, as now, there were no inconsiderable
number, withdrew for the most